A Tale Circa 1982

I just want to talk about only two of the reasons we go to look at work in a gallery or museum. One is to see what the artist has achieved; the other is to see what has been going on with the artist. While I am always interested to see the first, the second is why I'm writing.

I was remembering an incident that happened almost thirty years ago. I had a show with the Andrew Crispo Gallery in the Fuller Building on 57th Street and Madison. It was a modest show. The paintings were all done on canvas board, none bigger than 18 x 24. I had carried all 35 pieces across the park in two paper shopping bags. They were called Flowerheads. I really liked them. They were all done after I had found out that my girlfriend was pregnant and we were going to have the baby. The paintings were a celebration.

As a result of that news I left New York to take a job as an art teacher at the Putney School in Vermont, and had to come down for the opening of the show. None of my family came, but Leon Polk Smith was there with his partner, Bob, and Sally Michel Avery also happened to be there, which was a thrill for me having always felt a connection to her husband. A bunch of friends were there too, but it was not a wild affair. April Gornik made it, and was visibly disappointed, and so did Douglas Abdell, who was probably responsible for me getting the show in the first place; Crispo didn't show young artists.

I say all this because when I think back on it, this was really a show of what I was up to, what was going on with me, what was happening to me, what I was thinking and feeling at that time, consciously and unconsciously. If you knew me at all you might have definitely been interested.

And while the show was up my mother happened to be in New York. I was back in Vermont teaching so I didn't see her. When I spoke to her on the phone I asked her what she thought of the show. She told me she hadn't seen it. I asked her why and she told me that my brother Peter, also a painter, had told her that there was nothing worth seeing.

Now at one time my mother had been an artist, and my inspiration and mentor as a child, so naturally I was shocked by her response. This is the story behind this story. In my heart of hearts the show was at the very least a record of what was going on with me. At the very least but most importantly. In the most profound sense. The show may not have been an achievement and "important" in that way, but if you are interested in art as life, then it becomes very important.

When I think back on it anyone who had that slightest interest would have found plenty of stuff to see at that show. Beyond the color and mark-making there were a thousand stories in every picture. Humor and play, invention and a truck load of references to personal and public affairs of the day. In short these were nothing less than 35 little cave paintings that told the story of my life and the life in New York City in the year of our Lord 1982!

Furthermore this is what has always drawn me to art and still does, as a record of where life has been. Sure I go to see what the artists makes happen; as an artist that is what I am trying to do. But I really go to see what's happened on that other level, where they've been, what they've been up to, what's been going on. On some level, once you get past all the fashion of the art world, we know that this is the real value of art, not as achievement but as a testament of what life is and was! The record of where life has been! This is the real value of art beyond fashion and trend, which are of course telling in their own right in the telling of that story. And what a tale art has to tell! And to paraphrase the great artist Leon Polk Smith, all we have to do is listen!


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WING: Tuttle/Seliger/Smith

The following is an essay from the March/April exhibition at the Bow Street Gallery in Harvard Square.

Leon Polk Smith(1906-1996), Charles Seliger(1926-2009), and Richard Tuttle(1941-) were never Minimalists, but that reductivist art movement dominant in the late 60’s and early 70’s is the elephant in the room at Bow Street; an elephant with wings, funnily enough, that soars around, flits around, and hovers over this tribute to these three great artists.

Leon Polk Smith is credited with inspiring some of Minimalism’s most influential founding members, artists like Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelley, who were forever and instantly changed after visiting his New York studio as young artists in 1957 and witnessing the morning light clarity and vitality of his hard edge abstractions. Smith had years earlier distilled his three major influences: Mondrian’s severe geometric matrix; the flat Oklahoma plains of his childhood; and stark graphic images in printed matter, and with them he ascended high over the skyscrapers of the truly modern city he loved so much; they gave him his wings. His modernism was more rooted in a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright pioneer American spirit than as it was the Bauhaus purism of Gropius and Albers imported from Europe. Ultimately his painting was an organic poetry wrought from a Native American past and a passion for a brave new world.

Charles Seliger was like one of those Americans that lived in London and became more American for the experience, the way they say the English in the colonies were more English than English; his particular brand of biomorphic and automatic abstraction only became busier, more complex, more layered, and more ambiguous as Minimalism put its stamp on the art world.  As they pared off he only too gladly piled on, doing what artists do, resurrecting what others cast off. Still, his work also became smaller at that time, which is worth considering. If the Minimalist credo of "less is more" became the rallying cry of a generation; Charles Seliger spent his life proving that "small was big!" Where Minimalism became rigid and cold and mechanical, Seliger offered an oasis of relief on the head of a pin--a lush and intimate universe, an alternative future to an otherwise dehumanized 1984!

Richard Tuttle, on the other hand, took the movement in stride, striding along side it, got the point because it was already inside him, and kept moving; to him it was all matter of fact, part of the landscape; and although many thought him to be one of theirs,  he never was, and never would be, never a joiner enough to be a member of that club that would have him as a member. Not that the group chased Tuttle away, he just planted his work somewhere else, not in group think, but in some personal journey, some profound inquiry, quest if you will, a path wholly defined by the absolute necessity of freedom. The individual and stubbornly American spirit once more! He might have breathed the same air, gulps of Frank Lloyd Wright inspired Tony Smith, gulps of Leon Polk Smith inspired Ellsworth Kelley, gulps of all the artists that ever exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery where he apprenticed, including Leon, and Kelley and Martin; but no, he was always artist as individual, riding alone, out on the vast frontier, forever on the lookout for what he called "fresh meat," picking up diamonds where others gathered trash.

And in this they all shared. Always the individual, always the artist, always the poet, always unsinkable in their optimism where life and art were concerned, and always grateful for what art meant to them and the world, fiercely so, because life demands nothing less. And for that Bow Street is very grateful indeed, for them, to celebrate them, to cheer them, to honor them. So thank you! Thank you very much Richard Tuttle, Charles Seliger, and Leon Polk Smith!

Always in the Room

It is sometimes easy to forget that during most of the 20th century, there was always one guy in the room, one guy in the back of everyone's mind, that in the night sky every star in every constellation was outshone by that big round smiling moon! And every artist for almost a hundred years felt mooned by that greatest of French artists, who of course was actually Spanish! In that way that the biggest loser of every NFL season is the Superbowl runner-up,
we will always feel a little sorry for Braque, who really was French!

Art history, like all history, is very tidy. We get to observe every artist on a pedestal, or in a context. We get to pour over their body of work and actually forget that every time they finished a masterpiece they suffered the knowledge that the world cared more about what that guy scribbled on a napkin. Say what you like, but every big shot, every Kandinsky or Mondrian or Pollock or Bacon or Modigliani or de Kooning or Miro or Morandi or Warhol or Moore played a distant second fiddle to that guy.

The Tidiness of art history rarely tells us that you could never have Marsden Hartley in a room with Man Ray, or Duchamp, much less Franz Marc, or Diego Rivera, but you could and did. For an excellent example of the sheer mess of the art world just look at the Armory Show of 1913 that finds Duchamp with Delacroix, and Courbet with Hopper! Life clashes everyday but art history is a well hung room at the Met with all the right people in it. The truth is that every room at the Met in real life should have that tan grinning bald man standing there in his stripped shirt! Front and center!

When I was a boy in Rome I got to sit at the knee of a woman who had regularly bounced on his knee as a toddler in the Paris of the early Twentieth Century. Her father was his friend and fellow artist, the Italian Futurist Master Gino Severini, who like many painters had also made Paris his home. When he was in Rome she would take me to see him and he would tell me things like how to cast sand onto wet plaster and let the patterns which emerged speak to the composition of the painting or in my case, mural. But still, even from her, I noticed an occasional remark, albeit the tiniest aside, hints of a kind of professional jealousy. That man was always in the conversation!

I was curious what I should think as a boy. Shouldn't so many people who agreed so vehemently be right? But I will tell you, it always struck me as envy. The most articulate, rational, reasoned critique always seemed tinged. Any kind of dispute at all just made him all the more the undisputed king of the art world. And people just hated that!

My mother had a good friend who was the mistress of another prominent painter in Paris, and I swear I think the family pass-time, she had children from a previous marriage, was chanting hate for the man. I also swear that I know mature, major league art world players that when they see his work their heads snap to the side as though he wasn't there! They just hold their breath hard until they get past. That is how much pain his celebrity caused and still causes. Alliances of pain. This Mozart made a Salieri of not only every painter alive but even, maybe even especially, their loyal friends and family! All reason, all grace, all sanity just went straight out the window! This brash man just had this effect on people! He might as well have been American!

So as I enjoy the work of some or other painter, contemplate them in all their glory, I can forget for a moment; I sense the shadow is lifting and that they can breathe a little, that they can pretend for a moment, like every artist does, that they are the world's greatest painter, and sigh, and smile. A moment's peace from that man who never allowed any artist much more. Maybe the world will bury him for a few hundred years, forget him, forget his greatness, forget his influence, forget that he was at once the absolute painter's painter and painter's nightmare. That every brush stroke made belonged to him! Was his! That he was the Father of 20th Century art and that we are all his descendants. Like it or not. Maybe. Maybe we'll forget. But I don't think so.

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Push and Push Back!

I have objected at times to the idea of push/pushing and didn't exactly know why. The push I refer to is the one people do with themselves or others to get them over a hurdle or fear or hump. I remember the moment that I first consciously objected to the idea was when a teacher of mine suggested I push my work as a painter. It felt wrong. I remember that it occurred to me at the time that pushing my work would just make it pushy, and I didn't want that.

I also learned one thing later as a teacher, and still later as a parent; that force creates resistance, that pushing makes for pushing back. We've all felt it from early on, when someone pushes us all we want to do is push back.

There are lots of reasons why pushing is not a good idea and usually produces the opposite of what we hope for. I always use the horse to water proverb because it helps make the point that nothing gets accomplished by pushing. The horse drinks when it wants to and that that is not only as it should be, but what is good and right. The horse is free to drink when it is ready to drink and this brings us to the real truth in all of this, to the magic word: freedom. Freedom is what is being safeguarded through resistance. Freedom is our greatest treasure! It is worth pushing back for!

So is there anything we can do instead of pushing? When we push we not only make it about us, we prove it is about us(listen up Tiger Moms)! When we make it about the person we wanted to push instead of ourselves, the difference is automatic; we acknowledge their control, not ours, and all that is left is to encourage. Encouraging might seems like a fine line, but it makes all the difference. Encouragement gives strength and confidence to that person whose freedom we wish to preserve. Encourage is the difference between teaching to fish and providing fish, between helping someone or doing if for them. The courage belongs to them! Encourage is our responsibility as parents, teachers, mentors!

So what about when we are pushing ourselves you may ask? No problem, because when we make things about us, we are really talking about ego. When we push ourselves it is our ego that is trying to push us around. It is merely a question of disarming the ego by showing it that is is in everyone's best interest to let the horse drink when it wants to drink!

It is worth adding that this is why it is impossible to teach art. You take away an artist's freedom and they have nothing. However You can encourage art, as we all know, and that makes the difference. In fact, we can even encourage ourselves!

All of this explains why almost no one who was pushed to play the piano ever ends up playing one, and what a shame!

Forget What I Just Said!

Teachers say a lot of stuff. I am continually reminded that the luckiest artists are the ones who had no teachers at all. They call teaching "passing the poison," but if there was something worse than poison, teaching would be that.

I recently discovered that Frank Lloyd Wright not only didn't graduate from college, but that there is no record of him graduating from high school either. Our greatest architect! It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that if he had studied architecture he probably wouldn't have become Frank Lloyd Wright.

Goya, arguably Spain's greatest painter, did not get into the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Madrid. Neither did Matisse the first time he applied to the Ècole des Beaux-Arts, also arguably France's greatest painter of the 20th century. When invited to lecture at Yale, Jim Dine reminded the audience that he had not gotten into the School of Art. Needless to say Yale never graduated anyone as big as Jim Dine.

When I was a little boy my father remarried to a woman who used to be a school teacher and would grade my letters to him. I would get them back with a big "D" on them. Art is a lot like a letter to your father. It is to be read and enjoyed and felt and listened to and maybe even learned from, like, so that is what he is thinking--not graded! Not just that we shouldn't grade but that it can't be done! That it is not just wrong but immoral! We grade art so much so often and so completely that we think that that is what it is all about. We do it without thinking, and we have lost our way. We have lost our way with art. All of us. And the grading is the problem. Whether an A or an F.

Why? Why do we grade? Maybe it is because we don't want to listen. We're afraid to feel. To find out what is really going on. Afraid of the deeper meaning of all things. What courses beneath the surface, in the blood of things. I'm not sure. I saw an interview with Damien Hirst on CNN the other day, and as I had met him and spoken with him many years ago I was curious to hear what he had to say. The interviewer just asked him what it was like to make a lot of money, and have a lot of money(make the grade!). Pretty unbelievable, but not when you really think about it. Still, he managed to talk about being lucky to make the art, and not about making so much money. Do I have to say that he didn't get into the Leeds College of Art and Design the first time he applied, or later Goldsmiths, University of London? Although he did end up at both. Still.

You find this out over and over again. That artists do without school. That school isn't the almighty answer everyone says it is. Learning, yes. Of course. You want to learn everyday for the rest of your life. And yet there are other places of learning besides school, and some of them are better. Maybe precisely because of the absence of grading, or teachers with grading in their hearts. Faulkner and Hemingway and London, some of our greatest writers, didn't go to college. Didn't take a creative writing class. What does this tell you? I've felt this forever, but I only found out about Wright and Goya last week. Makes me afraid for our children. Makes me afraid for my children. It is not much of a stretch to think that if some of these people went to school they might not have become what they did.

I have a son in the graduate painting program at Columbia. I knew he was strong enough and stubborn enough to survive the teaching. It would get him to New York where he could smell the paint caked up on the city's streets, a hundred years of artists from Ryder to Rothko, Gorky to Guston, de Kooning to Keith Haring, Marin to Mondrian to Motherwell to Resnick and Rauschenberg. Artists to meet. Studios to visit. Elbows to rub and heads to bang up against.

Yesterday another son of mine balked when I suggested that he get involved in music at his school. He mistook my meaning. He thought I meant get taught stuff. When I explained that I meant share what he was doing with his school mates his relief was palpable. I told him that we count on the sharing. That gifts are for giving! That that is what we get from school for all the poisoning it does us. What we get is from the other students. Really. The only time I ever got anything from a teacher was in a private moment when they shared something about themselves. Something that was really almost an aside. The smartest ones never said anything!

As a teacher and a student I have some regrets. I was aware of them at the time. I don't regret that I never went to graduate school, but I do regret that I hung around and finished RISD(the ones I admired dropped out after one year). I regret when I listened to my teachers and then when my students listened to me. My son in graduate school would never have become a painter if I had so much as whispered something in his direction. We just painted together. The most dangerous thing I ever felt as a teacher was a student that was really listening to me, you know, desperate for direction or the answer. I knew that anything I told them would by definition close a door. If they didn't find the answer out for themselves then it didn't count, and if I told them then they never would find that answer. Teaching is such a delicate process. One of encouragement, and then getting out of the way. Takes amazing discipline. The last thing you want to do is rob the world of another Frank Lloyd Wright! Yes! I really mean it! And forget what I just said!


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

That said, what do we do? School and grades are how we do things. It isn't easy being a teacher, let alone a good teacher. I am a big believer in not only making the best of things, but also believing that you wouldn't have anything any different, any other way--you are where you are and you have to be so tuned in to that that you can, indeed, make the best of it, no matter what it is. It is your life! Love your life! Even in the midst of your greatest challenges--this makes you who you are! If we are going to change anything, change starts from within!

We are not going to get anywhere by whining about school and grades! Accept the challenge and overcome it! Learn from the fact that despite great artists like Goya or Matisse or Damian Hirst not making the grade at first, they persevered! One way or the other. With or without school; with or without making the grade. They fulfilled themselves, their dream, their destiny! If life is an illusion, a fantasy, a sick joke, then this is ours! Do it and love it!

Art Miami

Next to the word oxymoron in the dictionary are two other words: Art Miami.

My own experience is that art is a butterfly. It goes where it likes and you can't hold it. It is also a little like what I would imagine God would be like if there was a God; more likely to have hung out with Henry David Thoreau than at the Vatican. We go to museums to see dead butterflies pinned to the walls and hope there is still a little life left in them. And that is all I have to say about that.

Hello!

First off I've been consumed by a major project since April. It is just starting to turn the corner.

I've also just curated a show at Bow Street in Harvard Square, called STICKY CRAW. The idea of the show is complicated. It involves the subtle influence of the Funnies on art. The Funnies, Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, etc. The kind of subtle and unconscious influence that could almost be considered subversive. The kind of subtle and unconscious influence that could be considered negative or undesirable, and therefore negative and undesirable and controversial to even mention or reference. As I said in the essay, it is not like the German Expressionists or Picasso claiming African art as an influence. Everybody is cool with that. But let's face it, the cartoon world is much more prevalent and even pleasant in that way that we get pleasure from it, even if it is just the contact high we get from kids enjoying it. It is a happy subculture.

So looking at late Guston and seeing cartoons is a no-brainer. R. Crumb where are you? Looking at Marsden Hartley and seeing cartoons seems downright sacrilegious. But all you have to do is look. I was very uncomfortable luring artists into this show and then having them find out they were in something that might not be a positive connotation. I did it anyway. Nina Nielsen didn't think humor had anything to do with her work for example. Turns out Brian Washburn was comfortable with the association. Larry Deyab(Lawrence de Yab) was right there. I get the feeling everyone else, Margrit Lewzcuk, Mike Carroll, would have preferred not to have the association. Rory Parks I don't know. I've hit sort of a sour note on this one. Went too far. Trusted my gut and got busted. OK, I still think it's a great show. People, including Nina, really like the look of it. As I always say, just an excuse to hang some work.

I guess I should have just put myself in it. Jon Friedman observed that my images came from that kind of cartoon reality in a review he wrote of my work in ARTS Magazine almost thirty years ago. I wasn't so sure about it then either, especially since I had grown up in Europe without television, but on some level it was OK. My color and way of looking at form was not of this world, and humor played a very big role in that work. It was definitely more Marsden Hartley than Pearlstein. Next time I'll just speak for myself. My own sticky craw.

Larry Deyab: Return of the Native

Larry Deyab has reached a really important place in painting; a place where painting can't really start until you get there: nowhere. No one really wants to end up there, but when you do, well, you let out a sigh. Milton Resnick once told Deyab that that is how you know a good painting: it makes the sound of a sigh.




Larry Deyab is serious about painting. So much so that out of the MFA program at Columbia in the early Eighties he apprenticed himself to two of the best we've had, two painter's painters, Bill Jensen and Milton Resnick. As their assistant he mopped up, all the while soaking up their greatness.




Greatness was his destination back then, it was the plan, plan A, the only plan, the don't mess with my plan plan, but now that he has matured, and it is nowhere that lets him not only paint, but be himself, and make the paintings that he knew were inside of him, perhaps even the greatness that he knew was inside of him.




He looks back on that work he did when he was caught up in being great, when he was a New York painter, and he sees contrivance. He looks at the paintings he is doing now in Cambridge, the place of his upbringing(home?) that has for the moment inconveniently derailed him and he sees paintings that just are: just right.




These are the paintings he has always wanted to paint. In them he sees it all, paintings that tap into it all and reflect it all: dreams, culture, politics, poetry, religion, yes, all of humanity, love, fear, longing, suffering, and humor. A lot of humor. Surprising humor. Sly humor. Sardonic humor. Absurd humor. Ironic humor! The outright shake your head at the crazy way life does its thing humor. Black comedy stalking The Divine Comedy.





Larry Deyab has a wry smile for life. He smokes his cigars. Sometimes he drinks alone. In fifteen minutes he might do a painting that if he spent fifteen years on it wouldn't look any different. As Whistler pointed out: fifteen minutes, yes, but a lifetime of experience.




Larry Deyab is still serious about painting, but most of his images strangely enough come from the movies. Movies that tell us about ourselves; that tell us about each other. Images that he steals for himself, to speak for himself.

Is the work cinematic? Yes. Videographic? Yes! Motion? Yes! Still? Yes! Blur. Blurred in ways that keeps the eye in flux like a camera that can't establish automatic focus. Framed. Framed tight. The spray-painted surface flies in and out--from sharp to soft and fast and slick to brittle and rough and scattered.

The freshest canvasses are black and white house paint with some red spray paint. Weeks or days old. They are painted in natural light on his back porch, sometimes with very little, almost in darkness, studied in darkness, like the glow of a tv screen. They work on us that way, stamped on our retinas that way. Imposing themselves. Iconic phosphorescence. They conjure up words like Purgatory, graffiti, refugee, haunting, urban, and ear!

And then Larry Deyab reads-- all the time, mostly biographies, mostly about artists. He is looking for clues. Clues about the mystery ride that is art and about the riders, what made them go, what made them great. Right now he's staying up late, taking painkillers, and reading a new book on Turner. And he's stuck, stuck in Cambridge. Waiting to get back to somewhere, anywhere: Paris, Berlin, New York. Hoboken even. But right now, right now nowhere is a pretty good place to paint after all. From the looks of things, maybe as good as it gets.





Addison Parks, Cambridge
-- Post From My iPhone

Non-Refundable YES!

Faith is the non-refundable "yes!" Think about it. If you had had a non-refundable yes for that thing, that dream you bailed on in high school or college or later, and someone said to you, sorry, you can't be an artist, you would have said, sorry, NON-REFUNDABLE YES! With maybe a "get out of my way!" If when you got knocked down, when you hurt and it didn't seem worth it: sorry, NON-REFUNDABLE YES! Gotta get back up and keep going. Keep on Keepin' on, as this wise old West Indian woman I once knew used to say! Muriel. She was like God or Gandi she was so wise, and there she was, a maid for a spoiled English family.

I know people who are determined that someone else pay for that thing they want to do, like getting investors instead of taking the money out of their own pocket. Why would you do it any other way? You want to make a movie, get someone else to pay for it. It is the inevitable conclusion of artists who are always trying to sell their work, so that they can recoup their investment, get someone else to pay for it, get a refund! That would justify it. Right!

Wrong! A non-refundable yes! Pay for it. Therapists always say you get more out of therapy when you pay for it. Of course they would say that, but maybe they're on to something. You want to do something; pay for it. No refunds. And keep on keepin' on. That's how you keep the faith!

No big deal!

I like painting. I like the place painting takes me. I like looking at painting. I even like thinking about painting and talking about it.

I like the freedom that comes with it. I like the freedom I find in getting there and being there. And, I like painting in general, not just my painting. It is a chicken and egg thing; because it happened when I was so young, I don't know which came first, liking painting or liking paintings!

But I find freedom in painting, doing it, looking at it, loving it. The world of color and mark and imagination and light and seeing and feeling and vibrancy and intensity. Seeing. Feeling. Dreaming. Flying. Freedom.

Not many people see it this way, of course. The world is dog eat dog. The world has agendas. It makes it turn, apparently. I can live with that. Especially because I have painting.

The art world means business, which is why it has nothing to do with art, or painting. There is no getting around this, no having your cake and eating it. Make no mistake; let there be no confusion about this. The art world means business.

I was sort of shocked yesterday when I checked out a show on line. Held and Pearlstein. There were all these pronouncements and proclamations. Manifestos that made long lists of nos. Entirely about what it wasn't about as though there was such a thing.

I was once interested in the Brights, an athiest organization. The problem was, they focused on what they weren't instead of what they were, and that did not interest me.

It was as though Pearlstein and Held felt like they needed to make all these rules about why they weren't in order to be legitimate and important and powerful. Of course I think it is just the work of critics and dealers. Like me, they just liked to paint.

But if I have to prove something to be a painter, forget it. Not going to happen. Who cares? I would rather be free, which is why most painters just take their paints and go somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere they can be free. Anywere they can paint.

Otherwise you just get a lot of people with agendas, with opinions, with rules and restrictions and punishments. If you want permission to be free, to paint, you have to give it to yourself, and keep giving it to yourself, and if you do that, if you give it to yourself, then no one can take it from you, can they? And how cool is that?


-- Post From My iPhone